Employees Must Wash Hands

My mom got into real estate with a few years ago, and has since gained a lot of humorous and surprising material from her experiences there. Before the commencement of my most recent employment episode, I remember her telling an appalling story of an awful woman who once completely broke the spirit of a fellow realtor at her office. The agent, Samantha, who was very sweet and good friends with my mom, was, ahem, “mentored” by one Mrs. Cathy Gellar. After just two days of working with Cathy, and apparently being endlessly harassed, Samantha burst into tears and left the real estate agency for good. Upon other agents’ inquiries as to what had happened to Samantha, Cathy simply said, “Oh, her? She was weak.” I have now bitterly joined the ranks of Cathy’s surly, enraged former employees. Towards the end of the past school year I was looking for a new summer job, since I was feeling that one more season in the geriatric wasteland of my former nursing home post might send me over the edge. My mom said that a woman in her office had been talking about replacing her current au pair, and that she would ask the woman more about it on my behalf. A few days later, my mom had set up an interview for me with Cathy. “I have to warn you though,” she said, “Cathy doesn’t take any crap, and she’s pretty to-the-point and will tell you just what she wants. Her little girls are adorable though.” “Mom,” I asked, “Isn’t this the woman that made someone in your office cry?” “Oh that was just a cutthroat real estate thing. It’s not like she would behave that way with someone who is watching her kids.” Consider this statement blatantly obvious foreshadowing. I arrived at Cathy’s for my interview the following Saturday, trying my hardest to look like a fully-functional, professional, yet fun and caring babysitter. I rang the bell, and was greeted from behind the window glass by ferocious barking, a flurry of green tulle and little girl screams. Cathy’s husband, Michael, answered the door and invited me inside. “Come meet the girls!” he said, and led me to the family room. The two teeny blonde bobble heads were hiding from me behind a couch, and screeched and ran as I playfully tried to catch them, smiling and trying to act like I would chase around kindergarteners all day for free. “Cathy should be down in a second,” Michael said, and began to ask me the standard line of questioning as the girls tumbled through the living room and jumped onto my lap, pulling me into their playroom and shoving glittery baubles and toys into my arms. The girls, Elizabeth and Jenna, were dressed up in play costumes resembling Tinkerbell and a sort of Barbie and butterfly hybrid. Their personal playroom was stocked to the gills with the latest toys, games, puzzles, hundreds of Barbies and its very own closet filled with dress-up clothes and costumes. Needless to say, Elizabeth and Jenna had it made in the “Mommy, buy me love” department. Most brats do. Once Cathy came down, she greeted me with an exhausted smile and a very rough handshake. She was all business, to put it mildly, and her way of questioning me and staring me down made me semi-uncomfortable. The situation with the girls, though, was fairly hilarious, what with Michael and Cathy trying to inquire me about school and my previous jobs while the girls jumped on my lap, screamed, pulled the dog’s hair and wailed “Mommy!” every three minutes. After an awkward hour in which I really didn’t get much specific information about what my job would entail, I felt strangely like I had overstayed my welcome. I left with the uncomfortable feeling that I had no idea how the interview had went. I really could not tell if I had been impressive or not. It was like I had turned in a very laborious paper and received a grade of Q+ with no explanation whatsoever. After starting my car, I chalked the experience up to the mysterious category of “we’ll see.” After awhile, Cathy called my mom, asking her to ask me if I could babysit the girls one Saturday night. I thought the fact that Cathy hadn’t called me directly to be kind of strange. Little did I know that one of Cathy’s glittering personality traits is her talent for circumventing any situation in which she has to confront someone or deliberately ask a question. This woman has thrice or more described herself, to my face, as a “sharp shooter, tell it like it is” individual. This maddening statement usually indicates that the speaker is the most passive-aggressive flake in the world. I figured that Cathy’s asking me to babysit was like a test run. She would see how I did and then decide whether to hire me. Realizing that making the girls happy was the surest route to this goal, my mom and I went to a craft supply store and picked up around forty bucks worth of crafts, kits, stickers, make-it-yourself doodads and other items that spoiled children usually enjoy. I was actually happy to do this, seeing as the one nugget of information Cathy did provide on the subject of a typical day with the girls was that they are not allowed to watch TV. Yeah, she’s one of those parents. Also, the girls are “very creative and free-spirited.” Essentially this means that they would be dramatic, bossy, and would need my undivided attention during every second I watched them. I figured I had better make the situation pleasant with an arsenal of craft supplies. I showed up that Saturday with my Big Babysitter Bag of Bribery and a smile, ready to earn myself a new job. Cathy and Michael breezed out the door and I sat down with the girls to do crafty things for four hours and actually, it wasn’t bad. They were incredibly pleased with me and obviously loved all the stuff. “You’re the best babysitter ever!” Elizabeth and Jenna declared. Mission accomplished. I put them to bed and all seemed well until the doting parents arrived home. I had arranged all the completed craft projects on the table to show Cathy and Michael what the girls had done all night. I half expected Cathy, especially, to be quite pleased and thankful that I had provided the girls with a productive night and had obviously spent money on the task. After all, Cathy’s two motherhood goals are distracting and spoiling her children. My naïve expectation of basic human kindness is really what plagued me for the duration of this job. She gave the projects a once over, did a kind of half-impressed harrumph, paid me, and I left. She never once said thank you. I did, however, get the job. She called me, simply asking that we “work out the schedule.” Her rate was fair, the hours were easy, and I soon embarked on one of the most challenging experiences of my life. To be clear, I later found all the crafts from that first night stuffed and crammed into a trash bag in the basement, slowly collecting dust as miserable testaments to Cathy’s inability to be satisfied by anyone. I must say that during the first few weeks of babysitting, the girls were a breeze. For a week I only had to watch Elizabeth because Jenna was still in school, and she was delightful, mainly because all of my attention was directed towards her. Of course, once the two joined together and the epic shit began to hit the fan, I realized that this golden-haired, diabolical tag team would nearly erase any maternal longings I have ever harbored. For a while though, they genuinely seemed to like me, and things were going well. I don’t think I can pinpoint the exact moment in which it all went so dreadfully awry, but my typical days at the Gellar’s would decline in quality with every passing week. My days would begin at nine sharp. Cathy was very clear that lateness topped the list of her pet peeves, and was punishable by hellfire. I would knock on the garage door into the house, and immediately the dog would begin her eight-hour long barking session. Cathy would open the door just enough so that I could let myself in. She very rarely opened the door completely to greet me. The dog would attack me, barking ferociously, and I would slam into the house and say hello. She would usually be in the middle of trying her best to look important and stressed, and muttered out her version of “good morning.” She might as well have said, “Yes, I’ll undergo the laborious process of greeting you like a civilized person even though I am burdened by numerous important and official tasks. Why are you so annoying?” Cathy would then lay out a handwritten list of the tasks the girls had to do every day, scribbled on a sheet of her personalized realtor stationary. The list always only included the same three things. “1.Make beds, 2. Brush teeth, 3. Get dressed.” This list was waiting for me every day, as if I were not capable of remembering to have the girls complete these basic daily tasks. She would then tell me what the girls were to eat for lunch that day. Cathy liked to pretend that she was health-conscious. At the office, she regularly asked my mom, who is very fit, what she ate that day and if she had worked out. I was eating a salad at her house one day when she asked me, “What, are you trying to be healthy?” She obviously had deep self-esteem issues and longed to live in a world where everyone around her was fatter and less successful. Her DVD cabinet was crowded with workout videos still in their original cellophane. The funny thing was that the lunches she would have me give the girls often consisted of pizza or chicken nuggets. The funnier thing was that my mom informed me that Cathy also had a special drawer in her desk reserved for Snicker’s bars and potato chips. Cathy’s list of reminders spanned the entire phobic and irrational gamut. She would remind me that if Elizabeth and Jenna went outside, I had to go with them. If they rode bikes, I had to hold onto them. If I decided to do lines of coke in the playroom or construct a nuclear bomb, the girls must stay out of the way or wear protective headgear. Another favorite phrase she used to describe herself was “paranoid mother,” as if this aspect of her personality would be unclear to any living person on Earth. Cathy seemed to believe that the word paranoid meant the same thing as the word loving. I understood her concern for her girls’ safety, but she was worried about all the wrong things. It was highly unlikely that the girls would accidentally kill themselves on bikes with training wheels or be subject to kidnapping in an upper-middle class neighborhood where most mothers kick their kids outside for six hours a day like normal people. Every Wednesday, Cathy had me bring the girls to swimming lessons. Often, she would give me the library card and have me drive them to pick out books. I brought the girls to visit her at the office since she can’t go four hours without seeing them. I took them out to breakfast, to get water ice, to the park, and to my house to swim in our pool. All the while, gas prices were at record-breaking highs. She never once gave me gas money. No one should have to ask for coverage for part of the job, especially when a kindhearted person would offer such a necessity anyway. Sure, she would give me money to pay for the girl’s food, and I assumed my own, but she would fork over only about twenty bucks for the four of us. Once, Cathy even returned home and asked me if I had any money left over from the day’s jaunts, since she hadn’t gone to the bank. I suppose she thought that the six potential leftover dollars really would have pushed the financial needle back into the green that month. Cathy was also a blazing hypocrite. She was obviously irate the one time I was two minutes late for the day, but would frequently come home an hour and a half past when we agreed I was supposed to leave, neglecting to compensate me for the extra time. I even made up a lie about having a commitment to make, because I knew simply telling her I had to leave at the agreed upon time would solve nothing. That’s the kind of person she was. She even came home at 4:30 once, which I appreciated, and huffily told me, “I had to leave in the middle of what I was doing in the office to get home in time for you to leave today.” Gee, sorry Cathy. I guess the Snicker’s bar you had been in the middle of eating would have to wait. Cathy always restricted herself from being overly nice to me. She often brought Elizabeth and Jenna into the office to show them off, and my mom would compliment and fuss over the girls, telling Cathy how much I liked them. Cathy never took the hint to maybe, you know, say that I was a pretty good kid too. To Cathy, though, I wasn’t a pretty good kid. I could never match the impossible babysitting standard her previous au pairs had set. The golden au pair, Amara, had a long run with the Gellars, and she left a seemingly perfect imprint on the family that I had too much dignity to try to measure up to. Amara was the unlucky soul that Cathy had sucked dry just before she employed me. In fact, I was the first actual babysitter that she ever had. Prior to my stint, Cathy liked to hire South American au pairs to watch her girls all day and live in the house full-time. Amara was a Chilean twenty-something with whom the girls seemed obsessed. Every handmade thing or unique gift of the girls’ had been made or given to them by Amara. I found it touching that my handmade things were jammed into a trash bag in the basement, but Amara’s were prominently displayed. Anytime the girls were bored with me, they informed me of the things Amara would have been doing with them. There were pictures of her in the house as if she were a family member, and she was both beautiful and apparently more capable and my job than I ever could be. The girls talked about her endlessly and with much self-important pride, and just loved to correct me every time I said her name without the hard ‘r’ pronunciation of her name in the Spanish language. I eventually realized why Cathy was so thrilled to have Amara as an au pair. The girl had most likely been a privileged slave. She was from another country, didn’t have a driver’s license, spoke English as a second language, and didn’t possess the all-American abilities to smart-mouth and stand up for herself to a woman who probably paid her six-fifty an hour. I infuriated Cathy with my all-so-irritating need to say what I meant and aptitude to give her looks of disbelief whenever she said something offensive, which was pretty much all the time. Amara probably wasn’t even able to understand Cathy if she talked to her the way she talked to me. I could only fantasize that Amara, fed up one day by the girls’ antics and Cathy’s smarmy judgment, slammed down her apron, turned on her heels, and haughtily declared, “Renuncio!” before marching out the door and back to the Chilean countryside. The first time I realized I should have done something more beneficial to my peace of mind than work for Cathy- like say, giving enemas to elephants- was one afternoon at my house. My family has a pretty decent-sized above ground pool to which I would sometimes bring the girls to fill up some time in the day. On this particular day, I was swimming with the girls after Cathy had instructed me to never to walk away from the pool while they were swimming, and that it only takes a second for a child to drown. I should mention that the girls are actually tall enough to stand in the pool, and they take weekly swimming lessons. The chances of them drowning are reduced to how angry I’m feeling that day. Cathy was supposed to pick the girls up from my house at five, the time she had decided I was done my day, even though we had agreed that I was done every day at four. Before we left the house, Cathy said in what I thought was a joking tone, “Tell your mom to have a drink waiting for me when I pick up the girls today. I’m so stressed.” I should mention that Cathy never shut up about how stressed out she was. My mom informed me that she whines like this all day at the office, too, and once a woman for whom I now have a great deal of respect called Cathy out. She said “Okay, Cathy, I get that you’re stressed, but you have a full-time au pair who watches your girls all day and prepares all your meals, a staff of cleaning people for your house, boys who cut your lawn, and a personal assistant at the office. What exactly are you stressing out about any more than the normal person?” Never has a statement hit the nail on the head with such precision. Not to mention that Cathy has the means to pay all of these laborers, but is also apparently notorious for showing up to client dinners or drinks with coworkers with no money, and then sheepishly asking the nearest sucker to cover her, since she “forgot” her wallet. I laughed off the comment about the drink and she said, almost icily, “No, I’m serious. Call your mom right now and tell her.” She then wouldn’t leave until she watched me as I called my mom and tried to be funny, saying, “I’m bringing the girls to the pool, and Cathy’s coming over later and she wants margaritas.” My mom guffawed, saying, “Yeah, okay. Do you know the day I’ve had?” My mom assumed it was a joke, like I had. However, when Cathy showed up at five, she had a bottle of wine with her and slammed down at the table with my mom, fully prepared to hang for the nonexistent party. My mom was in sweats and hair curlers, with piles of papers in front of her and the din of her BlackBerry drowning out any protests she hoped to make. “You can hang out, Cathy, but only if you don’t complain about me doing work while you’re here.” Cathy then proceeded to complain the entire time about the work my mom was doing, telling her that she needed to relax. A tip for anyone who plans on it: telling a stressed-out Jamison woman to relax is a bit like teasing a ferocious bulldog. I sort of meandered around the two mothers with the girls, wondering if I was still on the clock and how long these idiots were going to invade my house. To kill time, I took the girls up to my room, where one of my walls is painted with chalkboard paint. I let them draw on the wall while I sent smoke signals to my friends for help, hoping that when I brought them back downstairs Cathy would get the hint that it was time to go. However, hint-getting is really not Cathy’s strong suit. Either that or she’s just bitchy enough to ignore the hints. As I brought the girls upstairs, they caught a glimpse at my mom’s room, which is painted pale purple with all kinds of flowery decorations and things that the girls wanted to see. “Whose room is this?” they asked. I explained to them, without thinking much of it, that it was my mom’s room. To take a leaf out of Cathy’s bitch book, I will “tell it like it is” and say that yes, my parents sleep in separate rooms, partially because my dad goes to bed at nine and my mom doesn’t even get in until one sometimes, and my dad also snores like a chainsaw. Their arrangement is half convenience, half a result of tensions now being resolved in counseling. My parents were, this summer, very close to going separate ways, and my family was going through a lot. Things have gotten a lot better since, and they are still together, but at their worst my mom tearfully told Cathy herself some of the details. This is what makes the following so terribly unbelievable that I can’t even think about it too long or my head will explode. The girls asked me, “So this is Miss Cammy’s room and this is Mr. Bob’s room?” and I simply said yes and thought that was the last I would hear of it. The rest of the day consisted of unsurprising details including Cathy inviting herself to stay for dinner, not offering to pay when the girls didn’t like the Chinese food and we got pizza instead, Cathy calling her husband Michael and inviting him over when he clearly didn’t want to come, as evidenced by his asshole remarks and obvious discomfort throughout the evening, and Cathy prying into my social life with questions like “You’re leaving the house this late? What are you going to be doing?” when I mentioned I was going out later. The whole dysfunctional clan didn’t leave my house until nine thirty. By the time they left, I needed a stiff drink and an extra fifty bucks on top of my piddling hourly rate. The next day when I showed up at Cathy’s, she sat down for breakfast with us. That was another oddity- she wanted to me to show up at nine but wouldn’t leave the house until close to ten, and would pop in throughout the day to visit her little angels and most likely “check up” on me. I was tempted to confirm her obvious suspicion by throwing beer cans and used condoms all over the kitchen, to give her a nice little surprise when she arrived home. Over her cereal, she started giggling and looked up at me. “So,” she said, still smiling like this was all some hilarious joke, “the girls asked me and Michael yesterday, ‘why do Miss Cammy and Mr. Bob sleep in separate rooms?’ They were really wondering why there wasn’t just one bedroom for mom and dad like in our house! I just had no idea what to say!’” May I remind you that she is laughing all the while? Did she think that I would join in, heartily declaring, “God, I know! It’s so funny that you, my clueless employer, just brought up a terribly private and painful situation within my family over breakfast in front of your girls! I mean, it’s so hilarious that your family had a delightful little chuckle over something negative that you, in fact, already knew about, and as a functional adult should have the presence of mind not to mention in front of a nineteen year old girl who would obviously be very reluctant to discuss the subject! Jesus, where do you get your material?” I could do nothing but stare at her. Did this bitch, really, truly, just bring this up to my face? Did she think it was something I was going to burst into tears about, to her of all people, expecting comfort and a hug? The fact that she already knew my parents’ situation, but merely wanted to simply hear me say it, confirms her status as a bona fide sadistic wench who I hope gets dragged through a messy divorce from her smart-ass husband. I merely said “married couples have problems sometimes,” and left it at that. “Oh, hey, don’t let anyone tell you any different,” she said, in a comforting voice. That’s the thing with Cathy. She has the distinct ability to take a shit on your life and then suggest ways to get the smell out. I spent the rest of the day secretly fuming, on the verge of tears, wanting to quit my job and roundhouse kick my boss in her pudgy, manipulative face. The next day, my mom came home looking like, well, how I do after returning from Cathy’s every day. “You will not believe what Cathy did today,” she said. “She brought the girls into the office, and walked them up to me as I was talking to some clients and other employees. In front of everyone, at full volume, she tells Jenna, ‘Tell Miss Cammy what you asked me and Daddy the other day! Tell her!’ Jenna obviously didn’t want to tell, even at Cathy’s insistence, and I was thinking it was something innocent, and I said ‘Come on, Jenna, tell me.’ She wouldn’t, so Cathy practically screamed with delight, ‘They asked me how come Miss Cammy and Mr. Bob sleep in separate rooms in your house!’” My mom said she had pretty much the same reaction as I. Cathy also repeated the idiotic statement that she “had no idea what to say” when the girls asked her. My mom said, “Can you please keep your voice down? You are humiliating me.” Cathy actually had the balls to say, “What? Your daughter brought it upon herself! She showed them your separate rooms. I didn’t know what to say!” “Well,” my mom told her, frozen with rage, “I would expect that two college graduates with young children would have enough sense to say, ‘that’s none of our goddamn business girls,’ because that’s pretty much what I feel like saying to you right now.’” The entire office stood still in the wake of my mom’s statement, words imbued with the same disgust and fury everyone in the office felt towards Cathy. I was immensely proud of my mother in that moment. The next time I returned to Cathy’s, with girded loins, I promised myself I would quit on the spot if she even considered mentioning the incident to me again. Thankfully she did not, but did ask me, “Is your mom okay? Is she still all stressed out?” She loved this concerned act, and always asked me odd questions in a creepy way, like the wrong answer would have me dropped into a snake pit. Once, in the middle of doing dishes, she abruptly turned to me and stared at me for a second before asking in a very serious, eerie tone, “Do you like your job here? Do you enjoy babysitting?” My heart practically stopped, so seized I was with fear that she was about to drag me outside and tie me to train tracks. I told her, vaguely, that I love kids, and the job had its moments. “Just checking,” she sneered, turning back to continue disemboweling puppies. From then on, the girls were worse to me than ever. Cathy seemed to have instructed them to be as mean to me as possible. I have no other explanation as to why they would run around me with tennis rackets, singing songs about how much they hated me, or plug their ears when I spoke, screaming to cover the sound of my voice. Once, Elizabeth told Jenna she was drawing a picture of a pretty girl. “Is it Kala?” asked Jenna. “No,” said Elizabeth, “I said it was of someone pretty.” Temper tantrums were at an all-time high, and I often left the house looking like a haggard torture victim. One day, I was doing a craft with the children of the corn involving paint while Cathy bustled around in the kitchen. A tube of red paint was clogged, and as I tried to loosen it, it exploded all over me, the girls, the table, and everything within a two-foot radius. The girls immediately began screeching and blaming me, saying how I ruined everything and running into their mothers arms while I pathetically tried to clean everything up. “I’m really sorry. Do you think that will come out of their clothes?” I asked Cathy with much fake concern. “You know, I just don’t know!” she snapped back at me. I wanted to smack her. Did she think I wanted red paint all over my clothes? “Gee. I just can’t win in this house, can I?” I asked the wall. I had begun to fight fire with as many passive, sarcastic comments as I could. Infuriatingly, my quips went unnoticed by anyone but the dog, who sighed in agreement and rolled over. She cleaned up the girls while most likely instructing them to loosen the legs of my chair or steal money out of my wallet while I soaked up paint with paper towels. She left again for the office, and I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to convince the girls to consider liking me again. After Cathy came home for good, she gave me a nasty once-over. “You seem to be in a better mood now.” I held back my scowl. “Well,” I said, “I didn’t spill any more red paint all over myself again since you left, and the girls haven’t told me they hate me in about seven minutes, so things are looking up.” “Yeah, you just were, like, so miserable earlier. Your mom was the same way at the office. You two must be PMSing or something.” She hadn’t considered that maybe I was in a foul mood because that red paint on my shirt might as well have represented the metaphorical blood I felt covered with every time I left her house? This wasn’t the first time she blatantly commented on what was wrong with me. I came over one morning and she looked at me and said, “Did you just wake up?” Hardly fazed anymore, I replied, “Well you know, I usually wake up like three minutes before I come here.” Did she expect me to rise at six A.M., hit the gym, and get a facial and fresh hairstyle before I arrived at her house? “Why, do I look tired?” I asked her, hoping she was just messing with me. She replied, “Yeah, you do.” Cathy was a first-class coward. She prided herself on being “a straight-shooter,” and yet she was obviously displeased with how I did the job, but never told me anything I was doing wrong. Instead, the girls would say things like “Mommy says you shouldn’t do that,” or “Our house rules indicate that you can’t bring that pillow into this room.” When I would ask Cathy about these things, she would blow me off, saying that the girls liked to make up rules about the house and if I were ever really breaking a rule she would tell me. Somehow I didn’t believe her. The most infuriating thing about working with the Gellars was that I really, truly, tried to do a good job. I have been babysitting since I was twelve, and I legitimately feel guilty if I do nothing but sit around while the kids watch TV. I like to try to do fun things with kids and I have always been well-received by parents. I mean really, it doesn’t take much to please moms and dads looking for someone to watch their kids. I think the reason the girls hated me so much was because if they were acting like brats, I actually reprimanded them. I would send them to time- out or explain to them why their actions were wrong, because I believed, like most people, that a babysitting job should include some degree of substitute parenting. I figured Cathy would want me to send Elizabeth to her room for smacking her sister in the face; that she would hope that I would tell Jenna that screaming, “You’re not the boss of me!” when I asked her to clean up her coloring books was not an appropriate response. Sadly, though, this only made them dislike me, probably because Cathy herself most likely never actually punishes them. I brought the girls outside in their backyard to eat lunch one day for a nice change. We ate oranges, and I threw the peels on the ground since most normal people recognize that fruit peels are biodegradable and not harmful to the earth. However, my action was apparently misguided, as the next day, the girls jumped around telling me how much trouble I would be in when Cathy arrived home. When she walked in the door, Jenna yelled, “Mommy! Are you going to tell Kala why she’s in trouble?” “Yes,” Cathy sneered. “Kala, could you come with me in the other room please?” This “other room” thing was classic Cathy. The girls would often drag her away into the family room, presumably to talk about me. When they returned, Cathy would never reassure me that whatever the girls just told her was really not a big deal. She treated the girls like they were business clients that needed to be satisfied and always told they were right, instead of little brats that needed suitable parents to tell them that they can’t always get what they want. “Listen,” Cathy began, “Could you please pick up your orange peels that you threw on the ground yesterday? It really upset the girls.” I absolutely could not believe it. She not only wanted me to go crawl around on the ground, picking up rotting old peels that were in no way harming anything, but she couldn’t be bothered to explain to her girls that throwing orange peels on the ground is not something to get upset about. She loved humiliating me. As she asked me to pick up the peels, I could practically see the glimmer in her eye. She probably used to ask Amara to pick up the dog’s shit with her bare hands after cleaning the floor with her tongue. Cathy constantly tried to show me that I was neither as smart nor as deserving of basic human decency than I thought I was. She also liked to treat me like I was four years old. One of her most misguided rules was hand-washing. She reminded me almost every morning that the girls needed to wash their hands before they ate. Obviously, this wasn’t crazy or out of the question. However, she then started telling me that I had to as well, as if I haven’t yet, at nineteen years old, quite conquered the concept of basic human hygiene. “The girls tell me you’re not so good at remembering to wash your hands before you eat,” she chided me with the usual sociopathic glint in her eye. I wanted to say, “Yeah? Well I also don’t pick my nose and my ass before I eat like your girls do, you psychotic tyrant.” Clearly the girls reported to her all my wrongdoings. I wasn’t at all shocked, as one of their favorite activities was writing down what I did wrong on High School Musical stationary. I once brought my own notepad and started writing down everything they did wrong and singing the list back to them with a smile. That shut them up pretty quickly. I often had to stoop to the level of kindergarteners just to remain sane. They would declare, “We can’t wait until you’re not our babysitter anymore,” and I would continue making sandwiches and happily reply, “God, I know! It’s going to be so great not having to see you guys anymore! Everyone wins!” After her not-so-subtle suggestion that I stop being disgusting, I reluctantly conceded and told her that I would be better about washing my hands. “I’m just a really paranoid mom, you know,” she reminded me once again. “I just want you to give the girls the same guidance I do.” I almost burst out laughing at this asinine statement. Cathy would often give me elaborate instructions on how to discipline the girls, including that bullshit “1-2-3” method, some kind of pointless colored sticks with different punishments assigned to every color, and the finer points of sending the girls into time-out for five or six minutes, depending on the age of the girl in question. One day, Elizabeth did something typically demonic while Cathy was still in the house, and Cathy sent her to her room. When Cathy came back that to the house for the day, she asked me how the girls’ behavior had been. “Well, Elizabeth had another outburst so I sent her to her room.” I said. “Kala, you don’t send them to their rooms, okay? We don’t want their rooms to be areas of punishment for them. You send them to the stairs for time-out after you do the counting method only after you use the colored sticks and respond to them with warmth and love.” She truly would tell me not to do things that I only did because I saw her doing them. I began to consider that she was legitimately insane. The hand-washing issue grew worse with every passing day. She would actually come home from work and ask me if I had been remembering to wash my hands. I would some days be so overcome with rage that I wouldn’t wash my hands on purpose. This is what I was reduced to; not washing my hands to spite her and hoping her Nanny-Cam would catch it, since I knew she would never bring it up anyway. She basically even admitted once to having a secret nanny camera hidden in the house. I stepped out of my car one morning to hear Cathy saying from the garage to the girls inside, “Don’t worry about that, I have a camera to take pictures of you guys!” The girls then informed me, “Mommy said she’s going to watch us with her special camera today to make sure you’re being nice to us.” Cathy smirked at me like she expected me to run in fear. I crouched down to Jenna and Elizabeth, sneered at them, and said “I’m only going to be as nice to you as you are to me, got it?” This was the first time Cathy seemed at all affected by something I had said. Before she left for work that day, I noticed her writing something on a Post-it which she then smacked onto the microwave. It said, in huge Sharpie letters, “WASH HANDS.” Talk about passive aggressive. I almost laughed. The note remained there for days, and I wanted nothing more to rip it down, light it up, and smoke it in front of Cathy’s “special camera.” The only thing that really kept me going through the misery of this job was the fact that Cathy was diluted enough to believe that her neurotic impulses were actually doing her girls a favor. She was raising two insufferable girly-girls whose highest goals were to become princesses, marry the Jonas brothers, and be just like their shit-eating mommy. These were girls who would have mental breakdowns over orange peels, pillows in the wrong place, and spilled paint. They were horrible to me, were probably horrible to other girls in school, and once laughed and pointed at a heavyset woman walking around the block in front of us. They were being raised to tattle tale, throw tantrums, and eventually resent their “paranoid” mother for not letting them watch TV, go outside alone, or discover anything for themselves. They were smothered. Cathy and Michael would never leave the house without obsessing over the girls for three minutes, kissing them, telling them how wonderful they were, stroking their hair and confirming their perfection, and assuring them that they were the best little girls in the entire world. Can you say maladjustment? Jenna even informed me one day that her hair was the best kind of hair because she had highlights that God gave her, while most girls had to get their hair dyed. “Mommy tells me that I’m the prettiest girl in the world. See, my blonde hair is so much better because I don’t have to dye it to get it like this.” I was almost certain that had her children been born brunette, Cathy, a blonde herself, would have whisked them off to Vidal Sassoon’s personal colorist the minute the cord was cut. I was so disgusted and exhausted by the way Cathy was raising her girls that I would often let them pretend to be princesses for four hours while I snoozed on the couch, knowing that my viewpoints on reality would fall on deaf ears. I had once cared deeply about this job, and by the end of July I would practically become a mute in the house. I had given up on trying to be a positive influence in the lives of two future trophy wives who simply didn’t care. The girls would often declare things like, “Why is Barbie wearing a soccer uniform? Girls don’t play sports!” I wanted to scream. I almost guarantee, given the fact that Cathy always rejoiced over what cute “girly girls” they were, that she told them such information, hoping to turn her girls into beautiful, popular princesses that wouldn’t bother with things like sports in favor of ending up with Prince Charming. They would regularly tell me that kissing a boy meant you would marry him, and their Barbies would have elaborate weddings that took three play sessions to complete. They were obsessed with marriage for some reason. They probably learned that being a bride was the world’s highest honor, second only to a princess bride, naturally. Cathy’s sister is the manager of a fitness center in our area. Two of my friends work at the gym, and upon hearing my Cathy stories, my friend Jess casually brought up Cathy’s name to the sister. “I think my friend works for your sister, Cathy,” Jess said, seeing if the sister would respond in a positive or negative way. Take a guess. “My sister and I have absolutely nothing in common,” the sister said to Jess. “She is totally screwing up those girls, and she basically refuses to talk to me.” Jess mentioned what Cathy did to me concerning my parents, and the sister simply said, “God, she disgusts me.” On top of that, my mom told me that after I brought the girls into the office one day to visit Cathy, employees there would ask, “How could you get your sweet daughter a job with that monster?” “I didn’t know! I swear!” my mom would protest. No one in the office could stand Cathy. My mom was pretty much the only one who was ever nice to her, and after the separate rooms incident, Cathy has pretty much screwed herself in the friend department. The very thin silver lining of the Cathy cloud is that I have never learned more from any job than I learned from working with her and her girls. I feel like I am now perfectly prepared to deal with any psycho boss I might ever have. I even practiced my conflict resolution skills by approaching Cathy one day, outlining all my concerns. “I just feel like I’m not doing this job the way you want me to, and I don’t understand why the girls don’t like me. I would really appreciate it if you could tell me what you expect from me,” I said. She blew me off, telling me that I was doing nothing wrong, and that girls will be girls. I actually felt triumphant. I had given Cathy the chance to ream me out, humiliate me, and tell me everything I was doing wrong. I was excited and prepared to defend myself. But there she was, too scared to even have the decency to correct me about all the things I’m sure she felt I was doing wrong. It was clear that she simply regretted hiring someone who could speak English, voice her concerns, and refuse to cower away from abuse from a five and six year old. Michael came home before Cathy did on my last day, and I took my money and got the hell out of there, thanking heaven that I didn’t have to endure an awkward goodbye moment with Cathy. Shortly after the Gellars overstayed their welcome at our house, my mom told me that on that night, Michael and Cathy had told the nauseating story of how they met. Since the most horrible images will always manage to sneak their way into the brain, my mom said that during the story all she could think of was how Cathy and Michaels’s sex life must be. Ugh. “Just imagine the two of them, how boring they are,” my mom laughed as I gagged. “Michael probably starts to touch her, and she rolls over, looks him in the eye, and demands, ‘Michael, honey, have you washed your hands?’”